Duncton Wood

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Fittingly for the author of several splendid sequels to 'Wind in the Willows', this book - like them - is tinged throughout by a form of mystical, pagan religion as well as being a love story, an action adventure novel and treatise on the common mole. Meanwhile, Bracken recovers from his wounds and eventually finds a mate in Rue, with whom he has pups with. Even then, as time starts to intervene, the past does become more and more of a distant memory, though we are much more able to record those memories than the past. A friend of mine loaned this to me in college in the 80s, having picked it up in England (it wasn't published or available in the US until several years later). However, he didn’t just take over but he also destroyed the religion of the moles as well by preventing them from worshiping at the stone and killing anybody who knew the sacred chants.

This is particularly of note since political power play by the manipulative Rune, and the decline of religious ritual are two major themes of the novel, yet neither feels as real here as later in the series. It was followed by two sequels, forming The Duncton Chronicles, and also a second trilogy, The Book of Silence.

Thank you for being my saviour Mr Harwood and to the many heroic moles that were lost during my reading of these novels. This is a long book at over 700 pages in length and takes some reading, especially as it is only the first part of a trilogy. Like Watership Down, which led me into these tales of moles, it had a story and a purpose and a great deal of life and love woven into its pages. Accompanied by Boswell, the strange scribemole from Uffington, Bracken sets out to revive the ancient rituals and disperse the evil from Duncton.

It is a genuinely powerful fantasy epic and it’s very well written (although Horwood could do with showing a bit more often and telling a bit less, particularly when it comes to character traits).Almost a decade later, Horwood completed two directly related sequels that follow the events of the first book, in which the central character is Bracken and Rebecca's son Tryfan. Don't get me wrong, Watership Down is a book that is excellent in its own right but the themes and morals of Duncton Wood are on another level and children would really benefit from reading about the fight between good and evil that is integral to this book. To briefly sum up a 582 page novel, it is an allegory of the cycle of decay, destruction, and rebuilding of a civilization, tied up in grand adventure and a spiritual journey into the soul. Religion actually plays a central role in the book, namely because we have Mandrake coming along and dominating the system by destroying the religion and then ruling through brute force. It fell short for me because the ancient religious story line seems forced, as if the author is thrusting our human thinking on the moles.